Listening to Mondrian by Nadia Wheatley

Author:Nadia Wheatley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: JUV000000
ISBN: 9781741761283
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2006-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

PASTORAL

Uncle Clem was a man in blue football shorts and a blue singlet. The soles of his feet were made of calluses and he seemed to walk on little springs. Every morning just before dawn he ricocheted across the paddocks to get the cows up. Sometimes from her bed on the verandah Denzil could hear him yelling at Kylie, the blue cattle dog.

‘Gerron, gitoutathat, gitback, Kylie! One fine day, girl, you’ll push a man too flaming far!’

One of the cows was red and temperamental. She was called Billy and she gave thin milk. The other forty-eight were all calm, well-brought-up Jerseys. Their hides were the colour of Auntie Mim’s coffee, and their milk was almost pure cream. As a city child used to bottled stuff, Denzil was only able to swallow Billy’s produce.

No matter how cold the morning, Uncle Clem wouldn’t wear a coat. Even in winter he strode out on his bare feet through the wet grass wearing only his singlet and shorts. The singlets had originally been white but they had been pulped around in the copper with the shorts for so many years that both were now the same shade of faded iodine. Denzil liked to stand over the steaming copper in the foggy wash-shed and watch the dye seep out of the shorts and into the singlets. She would sometimes drop a handkerchief on top of the boiling blue water, watch it puff up into a big white bubble, and then go flat like a sigh. The blue would creep in from the edges till all the white was gone, then Denzil would fish the hanky out with the long smooth copper stick and run it under the tap, or else Auntie Mim would rouse on her for spoiling it. Denzil believed that hankies were meant to be spoiled; and anyway, she had about a thousand of them. Since her mother had died, all the aunts ever gave Denzil were hankies – or pink embroidered bags to put hankies in. Once a handkerchief had been in the copper with the shorts, it always remained faintly tinged with blue.

Sometimes when Denzil was in the wash-shed Kylie would come in and push her head against the back of Denzil’s knee, and Denzil would crouch down and stroke her ears and whisper, ‘Good dog, Kylie, good girl, good girl.’

Denzil was on Kylie’s side and liked to believe that Kylie was on hers. Everyone else had it in for Kylie because of the way she hurried the cows.

When you herd cows (Uncle Clem told Denzil) you have to do it slowly; if they run, their milk dries up. But Kylie hated the way a cow would move one foot and another; and a third foot. Then there’d be the wait while the cow rolled down her head to the grass. Finally, bite; look up; down to conclude the bite; up again; swing the head. The cow would chew like one of the aunts selecting curtain material. And then the last leg would move.

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